User: Tom Christiansen

Re:Que? Que? Que? Que?

On: Is The Internet Destroying Spanish?

You are confused about "gender". It has nothing to do with your gonads! It is simply a grammatical classification, a property.

All nouns in Spanish are either of Type 1 or they of Type 2 with respect to "Property G" (gender). There is also another grammatical classification, let us call it "Property N" (number). Nouns are either of Type 1 or Type 2 in terms of Property N. Adjectives applied to nouns must match in both the G and N classifications of the nouns which they modify. This is simply the way grammar works. A noun whose property list is {N1, G2} must take adjectives only of the same property list. For example.

Some languages have additional properties, like "Property A" (animate) or "Property P" (partitive) or "Property D" (discrete). Some have fewer. Others use similar categories, but add or comingle further types, yielding a possibility of an N3 (dual) or a G3 (neuter), for example. Sometimes these are expressed through concordant inflections. Other times they are reflected through combinatoric rules. For example, in English, you can only have "fewer disks" but "less memory"; you can't interchange those, because of the combinatoric rules.

Other classes of lexemes may have their own properties. For example, "he runs" but "they run" are obviously alternating a particular property, the one from Property N above, in fact. But you can't apply property G there, at least in English.

The point is that these properties are not what you think of them as. It's a travesty the way language is(n't) talk in America. I suggest you take a few courses in linguistics, and start over again.

Re:Language is what language is

On: Is The Internet Destroying Spanish?

I dont think that anybody would ever argue that a nice traditional British lady sounds very much more intelligent then say, a lad in the ghetto that uses mother-fucker to describe quantum physics.

...

The twang of a southern drawl is not something one associates with a well-defined education?

...

Well, they can't pronounce aluminium for starters - another reason is they can't pronounce most other words correctly.

Er, hello? Are you completely insane? This is the most obnoxious and outrageous of trolls!

"British lady"? "Traditional"? "Twang"? "Southern"? So, if your madame mutters a four-letter word, she suddenly becomes "less intelligent", does she? What is the nature of intelligence? Do you understand the concept of variant registers? What about prestige accents? What about accents at all? What happens when Group A's notion of a prestige accent is the same one that Group B for cultural reasons places at the other end of the spectrum altogether? What about the application of simple logic and reason with respect to intelligence?

It's clear that you understand language-related prejudice and bigotry: you are a poster child for the same. It's this kind of thing that promotes conflict and worse. Someone who doesn't speak the way you do is NOT less intelligent that you are! This is the oldest lie on earth, and you should be ashamed of promulgating this incredible bigotry.

Either way, you really seem no more qualified to speak about Spain or the Spanish language than myself. If all you can pull is statistics instead of life experience then that's bullshit.

I do not believe in the notion of "argument from a position of authority". One should be able to carry an argument on its own merit. You aren't going to believe someone who tells you that 2+2=5 just because they've a degree in Math.

But since you've impugned my credentials, which appear to be of some import to you, permit me to display them for you.

Let's see. To start start, I happen to be licenciado en castellano. I attended the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras at the Complutense University in Madrid where I lived, during which time I studied filología española. I've also lived in the UK, have visited most of the countries of Europe, and have spent serious time on five continents. I have had Iberian roommates and SOs, some of whom spoke nothing whatsoever of English, and have gone weeks on end neither hearing nor speaking English. I have formally studied not merely English and Spanish, but also Latin, French, Italian, Portuguese, and German. I have done general studies in Romance Philology and graduate work in linguistics, specifically in natural language processing. I have studied Spanish history, art, poetry, music, and literature. I have taught classes in Spanish. I have passed quasi-delerious through the mystical madrugá of Semana Santa in Sevilla--and not as a tourist, either. I have travelled the length and breadth of the Iberian Peninsula, conversing with farmers in Gijón in their strange asturianu, with gypsies in Andalucía, with scholars in Salamanca, with Catalan-speaking school children in Andorra, and been out all night countless times losing myself in the bacchanalian festivities of the young and the restless in Madrid and Lisbon until I could no longer remember what language I was even speaking, or being spoken to in. I have read Bernal Diaz del Castillo and the Quixote in their original versions, not to mention the Lazarillo de Tormes and el Cantar de Mio Cid in the Per Abbat manuscript. I have stood upon before the foundations Seneca's home, climbed the Giralda, wandered aimlessly about the Museo del Prado for days unnumbered, pondered the sorrowful and indicting words of the emperor Carlos V regarding the Mezquita ("Hacéis lo que hay en otras muchas partes, y habéis deshecho lo que era único en el mundo"), quietly meditated in El Escorial, and beheld Granada from the Sospiro del Moro--and, like Boabdil, wept.

So, yes--I do think I've had enough life experience to speak up about Spain and about Spanish.

Re:To expand on this fp attempt...

On: Is The Internet Destroying Spanish?

And we sure as hell will continue to pronounce words without the "lisp" that Spaniards use to separate themselves from us "uneducated" Chicanos and Central and South Americans.

This, sir, is pure bunk. It is wrong in so many ways, it's hard to know begin. First of all, it's not a lisp--it's not a speech defect or impediment. It's not related to education level. And it's not global to all of Spain. And it's certainly not something that's done to enforce some sort of cultural separation.

Let me try to summarize this briefly.

In old Spanish, there were six sibilants. These lost their voicing, and collapsed into just three: let us call these S1, S2, and S3. S1 was originally a medieval affricate /ts/, but became a dorso-alveolar or laminal /s/ sound. S2 was a less common apico-alveolar /s/ sound. S3 was a palatal /S/ sound (somewhat like as in "sh" in English "ship"). If you don't know the difference between "dorso-alveolar" and "apico-alveolar", don't worry about it; just trust me that they aren't very far apart from one another.

When two or three sounds are this similar, something has to give. Either they grow closer and merge, or they grow further apart from one another. The seseo phenomenon is the first effect--that is, merging, wheras the differentiation of standard (read: Northern) Spanish is the second one. In "standard" Spanish, we have a splaying out of tongue positions into front, mid, and back, to keep things away from one another. Thus we now have a front apical "theta" sound [T], a mid apical "ese" sound [s], and a back dorsal (or velar) "jota" sound [x], which sometimes becomes not merely a velar but rather an uvular fricative [X]. In any event, they're now very different from one another, so the system is stable again.

The [s] has a pecular apico-alveolar articulation that sometimes produces the impression of palatality in non-trained listeners, who end up thinking it's really the "sh" as in the English "shirt" (but it's not). In most seseante dialects, which are found in most of Andalucía (with the possible exception of Granada) and consequently in most of the Americas since they were settled by andaluces, the merger of S1 and S2 has a reductive effect on /x/, creating a more forward and relaxed articulation of the velar, producing something more like [h].

These have serious ramifications on education efforts. First, you end up with homophones where none where supposed to exist. The orthographic system, which was designed for a sz distinction, conserves that, but seseante speakers have a harder time learning. They are unable to distinguish casa from caza or cocer from coser or cerrar from serrar. It's very sad to see spellings like "demaciado in America. In standard speakers, this cannot happen, because there's no theta sound in that word. /demasiado/ and /demaTiado/ are phonemically and thus graphically distinct. (Actually, the /s/ is really [S], a thicker sound than you hear in Mexican or in English.)

Another hurdle for victims :-) of seseo is verb conjugations. They cannot from their ear hear the difference between something like reconocer and recoser, so the phonologically-derived rule that the first produces an epithetic "z" (to make reconozco) but the second does not, is something which cannot be auditorally inferred.

One more stumbling block for them is that their weak /x/ ends up confusing some people, who almost sometimes leave it out, producing Meico instead of Méjico.

Spanish is full of fricatives, far more than in English. It has some English lacks; try to get an English speaker to properly say uva or pago--those intervocalic fricatives there are not in English at all. A voiced stop becomes a fricative intervocalically, and in most other positions, too. Thus the "d" phoneme, which in Spanish is dental and not alveolar as it is in English, manifists as a voiced "th" allophone, such as from the English word, "either". That means that cada is [caDa], casa is [caSa], and caza is [caTa]--all three completely differentiable. Because there's also a subtle voicing effect (which is not phonemic) due to following voiced consonants, words like desde become /desde/, which is actually ['dEZDe], or, if you would "dezhthay". (The two e's are allophonic only; Spanish has only five vocalic phonemes.) And if there were a word preceding desde that didn't end in an "l" or "n", then even the first "d" would become a fricative not a stop. Pues desde luego is going to sound more like [pweS `DEZ De 'lwe Go] to your ear (yes, only five syllables, and it might be [pwEZ] in some speakers depending on speed), which will bother you, as English hasn't got a [G] or a [S] in it at all. :-)

The familiar phrase Cómo se dice? shows something very different than most Americans expect: ['ko mo Se 'Di Te] (with the "k" from "skate" not from "kate").

Hey, it could be worse. It could be Portugeuse. :-) There Como é que se diz? seems to come out more as a Slavic-sounding [kmEks 'DiZ] with only two syllables and very few vowels--or in Brazilian, ['kO mu 'E ke si 'dZi zi], with seven syllables instead but some other strange effects.

Now, even though I've tongue-in-cheekly called the seseo speakers "victims", I'm just kidding. What happened to them in the South is a perfectly natural evolutionary step--that of convergence. It's simply different from what happened in the North, which is divergence. It is not officially "wrong" to sesear. But people who do not do so are not "more educated" than those who do. (They do, however, tend to spell better. :-) A educated speaker from Sevilla is no disparaged just because his casa and his caza sound the same.

So please knock that chip off your shoulder. They are not doing it to spite you. It's just the way they've talk, and have done so for many centuries. Cope. And while you're at it, you might actually bother to learn some fonética y fonología españolas so you can stop furthering these bigotries and myths.

Re:Language is what language is

On: Is The Internet Destroying Spanish?

I'm a bilinguist american, rare eh?

You mean: "I'm a bilingual American; rare, eh?" So, what's your second language? Not English, surely. :-)

Take the difference between American-English and England-English, somewhat quite similar. I believe that Spanish rooted in Spain sounds much more intelligent, smooth, and educated -

I note that "sounds" is the operative term here, and that this perception is in the ear of the belistener--as it were. Specifically, this type of observation says far more about the observer than the observed. Although prestige-based accents and the associated cultural bigotries are to be found everywhere, that's no reason to voice them.

• "Bostonians sound so much more intelligent, smooth, and educated than Alabamans".
• "Atlantan residents sound so much more intelligent, smooth, and educated than New Jersey people."

This is so breathtakingly asinine as to beggar the imagination. The only reason I'm answering is the next excerpt.

Go spend some time in Spain -- while everybody speaks Spanish (excepting Barcelona.. not even getting into that discussion) most speak 2 to 3 languages fluently. I'd say probably 60% of people speak Spanish and French that aren't in retail, 95% of retail people speak spanish and english.

Congratulations, you've just disqualified yourself from being able to speak authoritatively on Spain, too, not just from speaking about Spanish (as you previously did).

More than one Spaniard in four speaks something other than castellano as their first language. 17% speak catalá, 7% galego, and 2% euskadi. This doesn't even count the various vestigial langauges like asturianu, leonés, or aragonés--which tend to be second languages now if that, not to mention the controversial situation of the two alde(i)as portuguesas that somehow never made it back over the border in 1640.

Furthermore, you will find that outside of the major metropolitan and touristic areas, the regular people do not speak non-Iberian languages. Yes, this is starting to change a little bit in the younger generation as time progresses, but it's not true except in affluent young cosmopolitan yuppies. Your numbers are ludicrous. I challenge you to go to a random village in, oh, Castilla la Vieja, and try talking English or French to the shopkeepers of the myriad little 15 square-meter shops nestled away in sleepy, dusty towns. They will speak beautiful Spanish, sin duda, a rare prestige accent with nary a trace of seseo nor sometimes even of yeísmo, but if you think the older people and the common people of the Spanish countryside are polyglottal, you're nuts. For some, you're lucky to get Spanish!

Much Ado About Nada

On: Is The Internet Destroying Spanish?

Although this article does touch on some reasonably interesting and important issues, it is more notable for what it fails to recognize. The first matter is that Spanish (the world's number two primera lengua, and growing fast) is not only perfectly up to the task of generating new words using classical mechanisms, it is in fact doing so, and quite productively. On p 128 of the most excellent The Romance Languages, editors Martin Harris and Nigel Vincent make the following point:

Although purist hackles have been raised by the recent influx of anglicisms I(as in France, see p. 243), the productive patterns of the language remain resolutely Romance. The best evidence is that new concepts and artifacts which might easily have attracted a foreign label are so often named from indigenous roots, whether by derivation or compounding. Urbanización "housing development", currently to be seen on builders' placards all over Spain, is made up of impeccably classical roots. Calientaplatos "plate-warmer", lavaplatos "dishwasher", limpiaparabrisas "windscreen-wiper", and even, alas, cartabomba "letter-bomb", use only indigenous material. Through development of this kind, Spanish is becoming more, not less, Romance in its structure.

Although Spanish does regularly incorporate terms from English (the world's number one second language, and this also growing fast), it does not in my experience do so with the regularity that French does, nor even German. There it's "cool" to use English terms, especially in marketing. While this is true throughout Europe, this is hardly a new phenomenon, nor is it necessarily indicative of lasting fingerprints on the language. Lexical borrowing have occurred throughout history. You do not see the article disparaging the various and many words that were long ago borrowed from the Germanic invaders of the Iberian Penisula, like blanco "white", guardar "to guard, to keep", guerra "war", yelmo "helmet", robar "to steal", ropa "clothing", and ganso "goose". And this is nothing compared with the nearly four thousand words in Spanish that can be traced to Arabic, such as aceite "olive oil", aduana "customs", ajedrez "chess", alcachofa "artichoke", alcalde "mayor", alcohol, algebra, algodón "cotton", algoritmo "algorithm", arroz "rice", azahar "orange blossom", azúcar "sugar", azul "blue", azulejo "ceramic tile", barrio "quarter, neighborhood", berenjena "eggplant", cenit "zenith", cifra "figure, cipher", halagar "to flatter", hasta "until", jaca "pony", jarra "jar, pitcher", mezquino "mean", nadir, naranja "orange", ojalá "if only (literally, may Allah grant)", zanahoria "carrot", and zoco "open-air market"--just to name a few. And then of course we have the Amerindian languages' rich contributions of words such as alpaca, cacoa , chicle, chocolate, cóndor, coyote, llama, maíz, patata, petunia, tapioca, tobaco, and tomate --which you will probably all recognize without translation. :-)

Not only would Spanish (and in many cases above, also Portuguese) be severely impoverished without these words, so too in many cases would most other European languages. One can hardly begrudge them these.

What the author of this article is actually complaining about may in fact be the fact that nominally bilingual people in the United States often, in fact, no neither language particularly well. Later on in the same page as I cited earlier, one also reads the following:

If membership of hispanidad is determined by mutual intelligibility, we are obliged to exclude the creoles of Colombia and the Far East which, though often loosely described as "Spanish creoles", appear on closer scrutiny to have autonomous grammatical systems (for further discussion, see Chapters 1 and 12). More problematic are the "Hispanic" varieties of the United States which range on a continuum between lightly dialectal puertorriqueño and the basilectal form of chicano, which has undergone some of the morphological modification usually associated with creolisation and has assimliated numerous calques of American English lexical and idiomatic structures. These internal chararistics, together with the frequent code-switching between Spanish and English common to all Hispanic variants in the USA, can render chicano totally impenetrable to monolingual Spanish speakers.

That's certainly true in the Southwest, where you routinely hear this "code-switching" en las calles and with the ubquitous cucina-help chavalines washing sus dishes sucios, if tu takes my meaning aquí. :-) There is a fascinating beauty that comes from being able to freely intermix two languages in one conversation and even in one sentence, where words and syntax skip back and forth.

One thing that's seldom mentioned, which is going here, is that Spanish is not in the United States considered a prestige language. It is widely disparaged, relegated to the working class, or even the nominal underclass. This is completely different from what happens in, say, Canada, where the French language heritage is elevated and venerated--and vehemently and vociferously so, too, for where else but Québec can you find supercilious arrête signs where in even Paris and Madrid and Bonn and Tokyo you see normal stop signs? Sigh.

It is very sad but true that Spanish speakers in America are not taught their rich heritage. They do not know their writers of antiquity, like Cervantes, Unamuno, Lope de Vega, Galdós, Fray Luis de León, Santa Teresa, Quevedo, or San Juan de la Cruz. They do not know their writers of this century, like Federico García Lorca, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Manuel Puig, Jorge Luis Borges, and Rudolfo Anaya (to spread around the honors geographically). As I've heard say in New Mexico (the only State which is legally bilingual), "It is even easier to be illiterate in two languages than in one." :-( Then again, how many English speakers know their own literature? Few, I suspect.

You can hardly fault tejanos for their curious code-switching or their rampant Spanglishization. You may flinch at hearing how in Texas then rentan something instead of alquilándolo, or talk about driving their troques instead of their camiones. (The former is especially annoying, because la renta is one of those faux amis that already has a meaning quite different in Spanish than the English cognate would suggest!) Then again, when you listen to Texans speak English, you might be a bit unnerved there, too. :-)

In technical jargon, Spanish certainly has much of its own terminology, as this article on El sistema de ficheros virtual de Linux will show you. Sure, you see a few foreign terms there, like driver and off-line, but by and large, they are perfectly native terms, such as an enlace simbólico. Somtimes there are transliterations, like superbloques and inodos (eg " El NFS guarda una tabla de inodos virtuales y su correspondencia"). But Spanish has plenty of its own words for things, like teclado "keyboard" and pantalla "screen".

(In Portuguese, interestingly enough, although teclado is keyboard, you have ecran to be screen, a French borrowing (the French word is actually éran), not an English one. I don't hear anyone in Portgual complaining about borrowing the French word, although I wouldn't completely blame them if they were to spell it eicrã to better match the pronunciation.)

Better that the hispanohablantes (hispanophones?) should use driver or superbloque though, which are obvious in derivation, than that they should use such deceptive monstrosities as the recently legally approved term in French, cédéron, meaning, of course, "CD-ROM". This is evil because it is not traceable back to Romance roots, and requires several linguistic jumps to decode. You must first say it out loud, transliterate back to English, then lookup an acronym in English (misspelled, too--see the "n"?) before you have a chance of knowing what it means. This is wicked.

Now, you'll always have people arguing about ficheros versus archivos in Spain and Mexico respectively, or ficheiros versus arquivos in Portugal and Brazil respectively. But these are no different than arguing about trucks and lorries between the US and UK, or heros versus hoagies versus grinders versus sub(marine sandwiche)s here in the States. These are really immaterial. The transliterations are a bit more jolting, such as people using salvar espacio to save space rather than ahorrar espacio, or salvar un fichero to save a file rather than guardar un fichero. It annoys because salvar is--well, originally--one of those religious things having to do with salvation. Agonizing purists tell you that you simply cannot salvar dinero--that you can only ahorrarlo, of course, and that buffers must be guardados, as their souls are not in peril. :-)

But probably, this is no greater a shift than the mutilations we see daily in English, like "unique" weakened to mean merely "unusual", "ubiquitous" weakened to mean merely "commonplace". In the technical arena, we see it when people use "hacker" to mean "cracker" and "memory" to mean "disk space"--and, I suppose, "software" to mean by default source-less for-pay "fleeceware", although I nominate "Billware" for that. :-) It's happened before (consider "awful" last century), and there's just no stopping it.

Let me finish this up with a note of encouragement, taken from the concluding page of the chapter in the reference book I've already quoted from:

[Spanish] is also, with Portuguese, one of only two Romance languages to be increasingly rapidly its numbers of speakers; on those grounds alone its future seems assured. But in the process of expansion from minor dialect to major world language, Spanish has become a little more like some of the varieties it once rivalled.

These languages are growing, not always as one wants them to, but really no differently than they've always grown, and not as nastily as the article would have us all believe. If you want people to know a language, a literature, a history, and a culture, then you have to teach that to them!

I now return you to your previously scheduled mano-a-mano diatribes; me, I've got a burrito nuking. :-)

Decía Carlos V, el Emperador, que el inglés era lengua para hablar con los pájaros; el alemán con los caballos; el francés con los hombres; el italiano con las damas, y el español para hablar con Dios.

Re:Perl is "devilishly difficult to maintain"...

On: Interview With Larry Wall About Perl 6

You are on the mark regarding run-time typechecking. Sure, Perl can do *some* compile-time checks, like not passing an array to something you've prototyped to take a reference to a hash, or perhaps not making typos in literal hash member accesses in pseudohashes, but Perl remains at the end of the day predominantly a dynamically typed language, not a statically typed one. Now, there are many other dynamically typed languages out there, too, like Python or Lisp or Scheme or if you want a non-serious language then TCL, but specifically unlike C++ or Java.

It's good to recognize what the dynamic typing versus static typing means to you. It's also valuable to realize that run-time checks will be necessary even in a statically typed language, because there will always be range constraints and user input issues that can't be resolved at compile time. Still, some languages do a lot with pre- and post-condition assertions that you can somewhat build in to your programming abstractions that will do this for you. But they still can't happen till you see what the user typed. :-)

Re:It's real

On: Unhappiness Surrounding Perl 6 Announcements

Conferences are extremely tiring things: up till 3am, back at 7am. I quietly left part-way through the afternoon meeting because otherwise I would have snored. There was no spectacular exit. Apparently many people thought I was rebelling. This is not the case. I was just too tired to usefully contribute, so took a siesta.

There is no Perl Cabal, and I am not part of it. :-)

Re:Malda you fsckhead

On: I Want to Blow Up Silicon Valley

It's also spelt ueber (if you must) or über (if you can), but never, ever, as *uber.

Re: It doesnt have to be this way

On: The Secret History of Perl

Tell that to the C++ people, who decided that input and output should be done via the >> and << operators.

Remember how much Perl was originally used in a filter-type environment. It's nice to have a succinct was to get a common idiom encapsulated in simple syntax. You know, like backticks, which seem the same kind of issue.

In any event, it's about twelve years too late to argue about. :-)

Re:mathematical rigor

On: Stephen Hawking on The Future

this isn't about computer science. everyone knows that CS students are failed math students.

Here's the progression as it used to make the rounds when I was in school. Note, please, that this was mostly just a joke the math majors used to use to make fun of the rest of us--and, no, I was not a math major.

• A degree in computer science is for students not smart enough to make it through a math major.
  [It still took a 3.3 GPA to get into the CS dept when I was there.]
• A degree in computer engineering is for students not smart enough to hack a CS major (as it were :-).
  [It took a 3.0 GPA for this when I was there.]
• A degree in information systems is for students not smart enough to get into the school of engineering and finish ECE major.
  [It took only a 2.5 GPA for this when I was there.]
• A degree in education with an emphasis in computer use is for students not smart enough to get into the school of business and knock off an MIS major (poor choice of words, perhaps :-).
  [It took merely a paltry 2.0 GPA for this when I was there.]

And that, ladies and gents, is why American high school education is the laughing stock of the world. Or at least, that's the math majors said. :-(

Re:The best defence...

On: Computer Immune Systems

I believe "virus" has a Latin root, which makes the plural "virii". This is distinct from a word such as "data", which is a plural and who's singular is datum.

Yes, virus was in Latin, whence it derived from the Greek digamma - iota - omicron - sigma (sorry, don't have a Greek font). That's not the issue, however.

I can see you haven't read the other postings here lately. You see, your simplified view really was not how Latin worked. Here's the short story from today, and here's the long one from some time ago. Thank goodness we don't have to remember all those rules in English!

I find it painfully but amusingly ironic that you should have used who's improperly in the cited passage above. You need the relative pronoun to be in the genitive case--to wit, whose. I believe this falls under the category of throwing stones in glass houses. :-)

Re:Virus solution - better security models

On: Computer Immune Systems

To be honest, the Unix security model is almost as weak as the Windows security model in this aspect.

What you've said is largely irrelevant. Here's something I once wrote on this matter. You can change the Perl references to Bash, to accord with your own statement. I wish I'd saved the links to Abigail's virus. Check DejaNews.

--tom

_______________________________

No, it's really far more complex than that.

You are correct that it is no mean trick to write a program that can damage the system it runs on, largely irrespective of what kind of system we're talking about. And so long as you can hoodwink some unwitting user into executing that program on their system, that program can, of course, cause damages commensurate with the privileges and capabilities of that user.

What you've failed to consider is how the dramatic cultural differences between Unix and the much-maligned consumerist toys serve to affect the issue to our benefit and their detriment.

Probably the most important of these cultural differences is that Unix has historically been a source-only world. Programs are distributed in the form of source code, code which shall be configured, built, and ultimately installed on the target machine. Programs solely accessible in machine language form fall immediately under a taint of mistrust.

Think back to the last time you read a notice from someone whom you've never heard of before that was asking you to go fetch some random binary program from some random place on the net and then to run that program under full sysadmin privileges? I can already see the incredulous Unix sysadmin reading that and bursting out in uncontrollable guffaws. Because the de facto standard for program interchange in Unix is as source code, a Unix programmer will be far less likely to fall for your ploy than would your average Prisoner of Bill, who has been lulled into gullibility by a binary-only culture.

But for the sake of the argument, let's say that you've found a way to effect this trick. Suppose you're an employee of some reasonably respected company that happens to produce a binary-only distribution of their commercial software, and you decide to sneak something wicked into the binary image. You manage to replace the standard, clean copy on your company's ftp or http server, or even floppies or CDs, with your own naughty version. People are accustomed to downloading from your company, or using your company's floppies, so they do as they've always done, run the installation as the superuser, and you thereby have your way with their system.

If this scenario were to play out, just how dangerous--how destructive--could it really prove? Whom could you harm, and who would be immune to your ploy? The answer is that you could only hurt those folks running the exact platform for which your binary had been compiled, and everybody else is unassailable. By platform, I mean the whole feature vector that includes processor chip (eg Sparc vs Intel), operating system (e.g. SGI vs BSD), shared libraries (e.g. libc vs glibc), and site-specific configuration (e.g. shadowed vs non-shadowed password files.

Let's not get too full of ourselves and pretend that the Unix culture's predilection for source-only program distribution derives only, or even mainly, from altruism. We have no choice in this matter. If you're on Unix, you don't have the source, then you can't run the program on all your diverse systems. And if Unix programmers do not provide source, they cannot hope to have their program as widely used as it would otherwise be.

Consumer-targetted systems from Microsoft or Apple are two instances are a static monoculture, as vulnerable to mayhap as a field of cloned sweet corn. It only takes one genetically engineered virus to bring down the whole field. Unix is different.

In his acclaimed essay, In The Beginning, Neal Stephenson writes:

It is this sort of acculturation that gives Unix hackers their confidence in the system, and the attitude of calm, unshakable, annoying superiority captured in the Dilbert cartoon. Windows 95 and MacOS are products, contrived by engineers in the service of specific companies. Unix, by contrast, is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic.

What made old epics like Gilgamesh so powerful and so long-lived was that they were living bodies of narrative that many people knew by heart, and told over and over again--making their own personal embellishments whenever it struck their fancy. The bad embellishments were shouted down, the good ones picked up by others, polished, improved, and, over time, incorporated into the story. Likewise, Unix is known, loved, and understood by so many hackers that it can be re-created from scratch whenever someone needs it. This is very difficult to understand for people who are accustomed to thinking of OSes as things that absolutely have to be bought.

There is no one thing called Unix. Instead, Unix comprises a diverse set of subtly (and often not so subtly) variant platforms. A nefarious binary laced with exquisitely designed evil bullets hidden inside it can hurt only a few of us. When Apple and Microsoft laugh at our diversity, be sure to remind them that is it their lack of the same that contributes to their incredible vulnerability--and to our strength. Hybrid vigor ultimately wins out over a monoculture, for the latter is too in-bred and fragile to prove long viable.

Let me now return to your particular suggestion, that of a malignant Perl program activated by a Makefile rule at installation time. Because you're talking source code, and because Perl tries rather hard to attain a high level cross-platform intercompatibility, this form of subterfuge would appear exempt from the inherent protections stemming from diversity in variant Unix platforms. So, could your trick be done? How much of a problem could this really be? What might happen?

The answer is that of course, it could be done. And in point of fact, a demonstration model is already available, courtesy of Abigail. Guess what? There's no reason to run around like a chicken with its head cut off: the sky isn't falling. This sort of approach stands little chance of making a big splash, because you aren't going to insinuate it into a place that can affect a lot of people. Sure, you might catch a few folks, but just how long to you think this kind of thing will go unnoticed? Remember, it's in source code. That means anybody who wonders what happened can just look at it. There's a very low barrier to entry. And even if the naughtiness removes itself from your copy once its dirty deeds are done, that naughtiness is still sitting there in plain view for easy inspection back wherever you got your copy from.

Is there a way around this? Well, yes, if you're as clever as Ken Thompson. Fortunately, you aren't, and neither are the crackers. If they were, they'd doubtless receive more Turing Awards for their vaunted efforts. :-)

The only way you're going to get good propagation is if your nastiness into a copy that a lot of people will download and install. There's a very fine reason why so many archives contain a checksum of the image. It's to help with this problem. Security of course depends on several matters, including the strength of the algorithm and the integrity of the authenticating agent. But better that than nothing.

Let's talk about propagation some more. I assume that the goal is to have a notable impact, which means you need to spread your bad code as widely as possible. A hacked up install script, even if all goes to your liking, just doesn't have a very high rate of reproduction. First of all, how often do how many people install this software? Secondly, how do you plan to trick them into doing so? It's not really much of a challenge to get one person to this, especially if they trust. If that's your goal, maybe you'll succeed. But the risk of being traced and apprehended is high.

So how come this stuff can spread like wildfire amongst the OS-challenged? Can't whatever mechanism that's used there be used to get at the rest of us, too?

Over the last few years, a frighteningly frequent conduit of contagion for viral infection on toy systems has been the implicit, automatic execution of code with little or not manual intervention on the part of the box's owner. DOWN THIS PATH LIES MADNESS!. That this can ever, ever happen is as a plain a symptom of complete and total cretinization in the toybox world as you are ever going to see. It's stupid, it's crazy, and it's dangerous. Any programmer who even suggests it needs to go back to flipping hamburgers. Any user who asks for this feature needs to be quietly taken into the back room by the doleful men in long trenchcoats, where he will be told in no uncertain terms that his request is not only in the best interest of no one but criminals, but that he also now has a permanent record even for asking about it.

No, I don't care that a customer asked for it. Customers are idiots, just like any other user. So what if they pay you? They're still idiots, and it's your professional responsibility to act responsibly, to refuse to go along with their madnesses. The customer is not always right. In fact, they're very often wrong. A physician or a lawyer doesn't do whatever the customer requests, and neither do you. They, meaning the customers or users, simply don't have the background and training; they don't have the experience of seeing why automatic execution from untrustable source is the work of the Devil.

It's not as though we in Unix have never seen this issue before. In fact, we've seen it time and time again. And guess what? We recognized the problem and we addressed it. And we don't cater to that kind of lunacy anymore.

Here are a few concrete examples.

Remember when vi would--or at least, could--automatically execute macro commands embedded in a file in a specific way? That was a dubious feature called modelines. On my OpenBSD systems, if I type :set modeline, the program comes back and says set: the modeline option may never be turned on.

Another example of learning from our mistakes is the issue of shell archives. Instead of automatically running the sharfile through /bin/sh, there are specially made unshar programs that will do the common things, safely, and nothing else.

When CGI was first getting big, owners of toy systems would blindly install compilers and interpreters in such a way that these would easily execute arbitrary content coming in off the wire. Despite my pleas, both Netscape and Microsoft were actually advocating this! After a year of warning admins not to do this, and sending mail to the companies who were saying to just go ahead, nothing changed. So I released latro. Then and only then did various companies retract their suggestions, even though they'd been aware of the nature of the problem for a long, long time. Sure, you could be equally stupid on Unix, but for some reason, we weren't. History counts.

Implicit execution of untrusted material is simply stupid beyond words. And for some reason, the toybox people keep falling for the same chump moves, from MIME attachments to word processor and spreadsheet macros to embedded active scripting controls. I don't know quite why they just keep doing this crap. My hunch, and it's only a hunch, is that this is happening because Microsoft and their moronic minions simply cannot for the all the tea in China ever manage to think outside of their quaint but completely fictional little single-user universe. Maybe they don't hire people who come from a background in multiuser and/or networked computing systems. Maybe they don't hire people with real experience at all, just script-kiddies trying to make a buck legitimately but with no true understanding. Maybe the software makers simply can't say no to a customer request, no matter how suicidal they know that request to be. I don't know.

Whatever the cause, decades of history are completely and repeatedly ignored. They keep making the same mistakes, and they don't fix the underlying causes. Sure, there are things that are hard. Denial of service attacks are hard. People who know exactly all the ramifications of IP who go sending maliciously hand-crafted packets aren't much fun either.

But these highly technical ploys aren't why most folks on their toyboxes are being screwed up, down, left, right, and sideways. They're being screwed because of very simple matters. They don't have the notion of a protected execution mode. They don't have file permissions or memory protections. They automatically execute content willy-nilly, often with complete access to the whole machine. They expect a program to show up in binary not source form. They don't compare robust checksums from a strongly authenticated sources. They live in an infinitely vulnerable monoculture. They expect things to just magically happen for them without a thought or a care, and guess what? Their wishes are duly granted, much to their eventual dismay.

It is possible that mass-market factors may someday end up plaguing Unix systems in ways not so far removed from the stupidities that the toy boxes are riddled with. We just have to tell them no, and to condemn in the strongest and loudest possible terms any backsliding into insecurities that if we ever had, long ago banished. Looking at the Winix phenomenon, in which a dozen different vendors put together and ship their own Linux operating systems, all specifically constructed to be user-obsequious and Unix-hostile all in order to appease the lowered expectations of a hundred million Windows idiots, who, despite their numbes, really can still be wrong. The stupidity of the masses must never be underestimated.

Re:!? (Was: Re:Viruses / Virii)

On: Computer Immune Systems

secondly, even if it is Latin, "virii" is not a correct Latin pluralization! ("Viri" would be.)

It's really much more complicated than that. Here's the short version of that long one.

Not all nouns that ended in -us became -i in the nominative plural. Only second declension masculine nouns did so. There are several (I can think of three) other flavors of -us nouns, none of which follows that rule.

1. 2nd declension "irregulars", which were either full-time or part-time neuters and often of Greek descent, such as pelagus/*, vulgus/*, and the interesting case (as it were :-) of cêtus/cêtê.
2. Nouns from the 3rd declension, like corpus/corpora, genus/genera, and tempus/tempora.
3. Nouns from the 4th declension, like status/statûs, apparatus/apparatûs, and prospectus/prospectûs.

So virus fails to follow the focus/foci rule for at least three different reasons:

1. Virus was not masculine, but neuter.
2. Virus was not a count noun, but a mass noun, like vulgus, which was also (usually) neuter.
3. Virus probably wasn't even from the 2nd declension, but from the 4th declension.

Re:Viruses / Virii

On: Computer Immune Systems

Virus is a Latin word. Both plurals are used, viruses is more common, but in scientific circles virii is used. It is one of those things like formulas formulae. Why does this always come up? And why is it that when it does come up, we're always afflicted with a spate of paradiorthosis? Sigh. The only thing more annoying than a correction is a mistaken one.

I implore you, Mr Penguin, to read this FMTEYEWTK on the matter. Latin just didn't work the way you claim that it did, and neither does English.

Re:Talking about orthographical mistakes ;-)

On: Uruguayan SuSE Reseller Trying to Trademark Linux

I used the formal Vd to further distance myself from the person I was addressing. Think about addressing someone using the archaic vos (Iberian, not Argentine) as though one were addressing the Pope or King to convey false stature. Consider the difference between a parent scolding a child and a banker asking you not to jump the queue. I didn't care to get too chummy with the twit I was engaging, but I didn't quite realize when I started that I was going to end up in the informal realm of palabrotas.

The propio/proprio spelling error is one I'd swear I've made for twenty years running now. I think perhaps I've got a neuron crossed somewhere in the wetware. It took me a long time to fix *interphase/interface in English, or *supercede/supersede. Sometimes I just give up and add an alias in my editor to fix these.

On dé/da, hey, even my English waxes toward the super-subjunctivated, as it were. :-)

Re:what the hell?

On: Uruguayan SuSE Reseller Trying to Trademark Linux

Cuando llegue aquel día hipotético en que domine Vd un segundo idioma con la décima parte de la capabilidad vista en los autores cuyas obras--y cuya causa--ya discutimos, pues entonces tal vez podrá decir cuatro putas palabras sobre la buena ortografía. Pero ahora, ni se le ocurra. Vaya maleducado que es Vd que no se dé cuenta del respecto debido a estos estimados señores! Le aseguro que habrán traducido esta noticia no por su proprio beneficio, sino por Vd.

O sea, cállese el hocico, idiota ingrato!

Re:Articles vs Comments

On: The Secret History of Perl

Well, thanks. I'm glad we could be of service. Some of the better postings weren't even highly scored.

Re: It doesnt have to be this way

On: The Secret History of Perl

I think the idea is that instead of defining a new operator in the language, you should be able to write a subroutine to encapsulate reading lines from files given on the command line.

Feel free. I just showed you the code. :-)

Then you wouldn't need to use idioms that look completely baffling to the novice.

That one I reject. You don't design a language so it compromises the long-term users with the fleetingly ephemeral novices. The amount of time you spend not knowing something pales before the time you spend knowing it.

And Perl *was* designed for an easy learning curve, you know. The people is was written by and for find it extremely simple. My grandmother probably wouldn't, but that's no one's fault.

Even though the readline operator was the oddest thing to me when I first looked at Perl, that was all of five minutes back on December 18th 1997. That's something like one and quarter million times that initial five unsettled minutes. Shall we reverse it and make me pay 1,264,032 times for something just to make some neophytes first five minutes somehow easier? I think not.

(Although to be fair the diamond operator is one of the first things you learn.) And it's easy for users to see what's going on by looking at the source,

It's already easy to do so. This wouldn't improve how easily a perl programmer could read your code.

and easy to define your own version.

One again, go for it. :-)

You also keep the diamond operator in reserve so you could use it for something else.

Oh, now you've just gone and shot yourself. Either it's perfectly acceptable to use new operators that weren't in ancient Semitic, or else it isn't.

Perl has plenty of other operators in it that the Assyrians and the Sumerians never heard of. Big deal. That's irrelevant. If you want to use English, go for it. If you don't want to use what Perl offers, especially its regular expressions, for fear of a new operator, then perhaps you would be happier with something else.

I've never understood why people have trouble with things like this. It's all so easy. Just look it up, and now you know it.

Here are Perl's operators. Notice how finite they are:

leftterms and list operators (leftward)
left->
nonassoc++ --
right**
right! ~ \ and unary + and -
left=~ !~
left* / % x
left+ - .
left<< >>
nonassocnamed unary operators
nonassoc< > <= >= lt gt le ge
nonassoc== != <=> eq ne cmp
left&
left| ^
left&&
left||
nonassoc.....
right?:
right= += -= *= etc.
left, =>
nonassoclist operators (rightward)
rightnot
leftand
leftor xor

Most of those are already familiar. The few that aren't, you can always look up, and then they will be. Perl doesn't go adding new operators willy-nilly. We got the spaceship in 91 or before, and the arrow in 93. Not much really happens since then. And we got the angle operator in 87. You'd think people would've gotten used to it by now. :-)

Of course, the regexes have their own language. Here they are:

\Quote the next metacharacter
^Match the beginning of the line
.Match any character (except newline)
$Match the end of the line (or before newline at the end)
|Alternation
()Grouping
[]Character class

*Match 0 or more times
+Match 1 or more times
?Match 1 or 0 times
{n}Match exactly n times
{n,}Match at least n times
{n,m}Match at least n but not more than m times

*?Match 0 or more times
+?Match 1 or more times
??Match 0 or 1 time
{n}?Match exactly n times
{n,}?Match at least n times
{n,m}? Match at least n but not more than m times

\ttab
\nnewline
\rreturn
\fform feed
\aalarm (bell)
\eescape (think troff)
\033octal char
\x1Bhex char
\x{263a}wide hex char
\c[control char
\llowercase next char (think vi)
\uuppercase next char (think vi)
\Llowercase till \E (think vi)
\Uuppercase till \E (think vi)
\Eend case modification (think vi)
\Qquote (disable) pattern metacharacters till \E

\wMatch a "word" character (alphanumeric plus "_")
\WMatch a non-word character
\sMatch a whitespace character
\SMatch a non-whitespace character
\dMatch a digit character
\DMatch a non-digit character
\pP Match P, named property.Use \p{Prop} for longer names.
\PP Match non-P
\XMatch eXtended Unicode "combining character sequence",
equivalent to (?:\PM\pM*)
\CMatch a single C char (octet) even under utf8.

\bMatch a word boundary
\BMatch a non-(word boundary)
\AMatch only at beginning of string
\ZMatch only at end of string, or before newline at the end
\zMatch only at end of string
\GMatch only where previous m//g left off (works only with /g)

I think only the extensions are a bit tricky:

(?#text)
A comment.

(?:pattern)
(?imsx-imsx:pattern)
This is for clustering, not capturing.

(?=pattern)
A zero-width positive lookahead assertion.

(?!pattern)
A zero-width negative lookahead assertion.

(?<=pattern)
A zero-width positive lookbehind assertion.

(?<!pattern)
A zero-width negative lookbehind assertion.

(?{ code })
Experimental "evaluate any Perl code" zero-width assertion.

(?p{ code })
Very experimental "postponed" regular subexpression.

(?>pattern)
An "independent" subexpression.

(?(condition)yes-pattern|no-pattern)
(?(condition)yes-pattern)
Conditional expression.

(?imsx-imsx)
One or more embedded pattern-match modifiers.

Maybe it's just be, but I think the only nasty ones are the parenned bits, and again, you can look them up.

I'm big on the "look it up thing". From the my earliest days, we always had dictionaries and encyclopedias around the house. My mom, a teacher, was always having us look things up. And of course, every time you go to the reference book, you come away with more than you bargained for.

Perhaps I have an encyclopedic memory that others don't have. Or maybe I use this stuff more. I still look up some of the funny parenned bits Ilya has added. I don't mind that -- too much. :-)

Re:source release

On: Interview: CmdrTaco and Hemos Tell All

Furthermore, it's easy to get offended at the implication that we might not understand their code, but have you ever tried reading uncommented Perl written by someone other than yourself? Perl's a wonderful language to write in, but its flexibility makes in nearly incomprehensible unless the writer has the same Perl style as you.

Oh please. Not that tired old refrain again. Didn't we beat this into the ground yesterday?

Spaghetti code sucks.
What language it is in doesn't matter.

Hemos waxes poetic

On: Interview: CmdrTaco and Hemos Tell All

Have you ever noticed how when you read in `light' mode, the darnedest things happen? :-)

--tom

The computer *is* the game

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re: More "News for Nerds" Please... (Score:7, Brilliant)
by Hemos (hemos@slashdot.org) on Thursday January 06, @05:08PM EDT
(User Info) http://hemos.net

Recently disturbed by News for Nerds thread, but inspired by Tolkien, I wrote this:

I sit beside the screen and think
Of all that I have seen
Of flaming trolls and clueless nerds
And topics that have been.

I sit beside the screen and think
Of how Slashdot shall be
When programs come without a source
That I shall ever see.

Simply Brilliant, eh? I can't wait to see my score. I think it gets a 7!

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re: More "News for Nerds" Please... (Score:3, Funny)
by Tom Christiansen (tchrist@perl.com) on on Thursday January 06, @05:15PM EDT
(User Info) http://language.perl.com/

Sure, Hemos, rig it so you get a 7. Sheesh! That's what happens when *you* have the source code. :-)

Re:Legos kiddies and professional architects

On: The Secret History of Perl

just one little stupid correction: Sapir and Whorf were two people, not one.

I was alluding to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, but dropped the "hypothesis" portion.

FEATURE: Spell check button

On: Interview: CmdrTaco and Hemos Tell All

I would do anything for a spell check button as an optional part of the Preview process. You could hit Submit, Preview, or Preview with Spell Checking It's very easy to implement. Essentially just run the submission through striphtml | ispell -l | sort -u, and then put those words in a separate little list in the preview output. Heck, maybe even put blink tags around them in the shown output, or red coloration or something.

This is very easy to do. If we had more up-to-date source, I would happily do it myself and give it to them. Actually, as soon as we have it, I shall.

Re:Why Linux?

On: Mac OS X Officially Previewed

OS X is unlikely to have support for large numbers of users

Like what, like just two bits for the uid? I can just see it now:

• uid == 0b00: "root"
• uid == 0b01: "daemon"
• uid == 0b10: "luser"
• uid == 0b11: "nobody"

The humor-impaired should please insert smileys. I'm not arguing with anybody, just applying levity.

Articles vs Comments

On: The Secret History of Perl

After some 255 comments posted, it's pretty clear that nearly everyone is commenting on the comments instead of commenting on the articles.

That's really quite a shame, because the article is rather a good bit better than the comments are.

Re:There *is* such a thing as too much flexibility

On: The Secret History of Perl

Tom's suggestion that you hire only experienced C++ programmers to write perl is unrealistic)

I can't imagine which Tom you might be referring to, because it certainly wasn't this one.